We are not terrible wikileaks

Ah, what a fertile occasion to criticize American democracy gave a story with a scandalous Wikileak site! And if someone dared to defend the United States, whose soldiers die not in virtual, but real military operations against international terrorism, then this is not good at all. Continuous cynicism and hypocrisy, this American democracy, as President Medvedev, Prime Minister Putin, Foreign Minister Lavrov and further according to the list representatives of the Russian elite, vying. Yes, and opposition citizens received a reason to talk about the fact that from now on the West had lost the right to protect them.

However, for Russia itself, the question is much more important why Russian statesmen allow themselves to talk so imposingly and condescendingly about the structure of American democracy. Recently, Vitaly Tretyakov, at a lecture at the Higher School of Television, compared the American regime of secrecy with the Russian/Soviet. In his opinion, we have secrecy "old -fashioned and authoritarian", and they have "modern and democratically." We “hide the secret needle in the haystack and classify the whole field with several dozen stacks ... In the USA, they throw a secret needle into a giant pile of unequal needles and illuminate all this with a searchlight. Find ... But there is only one.”

This essence, in my opinion, requires clarification. In the United States, the state secrecy regime traditionally applies to documents of departments ensuring the country's national security. The expansion and strengthening of secrecy was noticeably contributed to the Cold War, and then the attacks of September 11, 2001. In the United States itself there are a lot of critics not only abuse of secrecy, but also the unlimited powers of the president in foreign policy. However, the most stringent opponents agree with the need for certain closedness in this area, so as not to harm military operations or negotiations. In addition, there is a rule of regular declassification of state documents, and the powers of the president, as you know, are limited by a period of 8 years.

We should not forget about the role of free press, thanks to which many state secrets become known to the general public before their official declassification. So it was with the secrets of the American military campaign in Vietnam, which became known as the operation to publish Pentagon Papers in 1971. The same thing happened with Wikileaks documents. As for Russia, a long -known fact was confirmed here: American diplomats make their conclusions, mainly the monitor of the local press of different directions.

In Russia, even today, secret documents of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Intelligence Services in the old fashioned way are transported by diplomatic agents. There is also no practice of regular declassification: even documents of 70 years ago it is impossible for independent historians to get.

However, the Russian regime of secrecy applies not only to foreign policy departments, but also to all federal authorities of the power "vertical". The practice of Stalin’s times continues, when absolute secrecy was built into the basic principle of the power of the power within the country, when the entire correspondence of party and state bodies from top to bottom and bottom was classified and sent to the addressees through the Feldyger Corps of the OGPU/NKVD/Ministry of Internal Affairs. Feldsvyaz covered all the regions of the country up to its most distant corners. Urgent telegrams were sent by a cipher. The authorities acted as an external administration in the territory deeply hostile to it. Only during the August Putch of 1991, the newspapers appeared in the newspapers of encrypted telegrams that were sent from the Central Committee’s secretariat to local party bodies.

Today, the Feldyger Corps of the OGPU/NKVD/Ministry of Internal Affairs was replaced by the State Feldyger Service of the Russian Federation. If in Soviet times few of the uninitiated at all knew about the Feldyger Corps, today the service has their own site . Everyone can go to him and read that the tasks of the feldyger service include the delivery of departures of special importance (in Soviet times, secret documents were called the “Special folder” stamp. - I.P.), the secret and top secret correspondence of the President, the federal bodies of state power, the bodies of the prosecutor's office, state authorities of the constituent entities of the Russian Federation ... members of the Council of the Federation and deputies of the State Duma ... The Ministry of Defense of Russia, the organs ... of the internal troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs ... of the territorial bodies of the FSB ... ".

As in Soviet times, the real state policy in the country is still carried out today not only from a potential external enemy, but also from their own people. It becomes public what is allowed to reach the surface. The federal authorities can have super -modernized sites, but who, besides the authors of documents and executors to whom these documents are addressed, knows what is contained in the secret and strictly secret correspondence, daily transported by the country by the feldyger service?

It is such an old -fashioned regime of secrecy that gives Russian officials absolute confidence that their secret documents will never fall on the Internet. Therefore, they allow themselves to laugh at the simple -minded Americans. Therefore, they allow to “chat” their opponents within the country, creating the effect of democracy, as in the West. Therefore, all new wiring and provocations plan to strengthen their power.